The Duke of Edinburgh announcing last week he was going to hang up his mac and stop doing official duties certainly caused a bit of to-do.

It all started after news of an emergency meeting at Buckingham Palace was made public and speculation, as they say, became rife.

Was the Queen going to abdicate, had she bought some new Corgis she wanted to show off . . . had someone died?

The press has form pronouncing Royals dead with undue haste as fans of the late Queen Mum can testify.

When she eventually did shuffle of this mortal coil it almost had to come with the qualifier ‘honest’ so many false runs had there been.

Inevitably when news came out there was going to be this announcement there was a bit of gun jumping yet again.

The Sun ran an online headline: “Prince Philip dead at 95, how did the Duke of Edinburgh die, etc etc.”

Going by that ‘etc etc’ tagged on at the end, it was all a bit disrespectful so it was somewhat ironic when the same paper latched onto a tweet sent by the Labour candidate for Newcastle Central, Chi Onwurah.

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In it she wrote: ‘Congratulations to Prince Philip on retiring in financial security at time of his choosing from a job he enjoys #forthemanynotthefew #waspi’.

As well as being factually accurate - ie not pronouncing him dead - she was effectively saying he’s in a fortuitous position for his retirement with the implication being many others aren’t. Who can argue with that?

Sadly, there has only been a brief window of opportunity to criticise our beloved royals and that was in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

That window has now been firmly closed and bricked up thanks to the renewed popularity of the Royals thanks to the new kids on the Palace block.

This and the fact we are in general election mode meant the usual suspects had no problems finding some useful Tories to slag Chi off.

However such was the slimness of the material to work on, they weren’t exactly household names.

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There was ‘Top Tory’ Nadhim Zahawi who I’m only aware of because of the similarity of his name to that of the current leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, which possibly explains why he was first out of the blocks to ‘defend’ the Monarchy.

“That is shameful and wrong,” this top Tory thundered.

Meanwhile another Tory, Andrew Rosindell, who hasn’t exactly pulled up many trees in Parliament, piled in, saying: “I am disgusted by the comments made by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour candidate, Chi Onwurah, to imply Prince Philip is not a dedicated public servant.”

Ms Onwurah said nothing of the sort but that of course isn’t the point.

Freedom of speech or expression only applies in certain circumstances.